Memory, Migration, and Modern Fiction: An Introduction

This introduction situates refugee and migrant fiction within discourses of memory studies, transnational migration, and cosmopolitanism. It describes a reorientation to place and time in refugee and migrant fiction that is defined by the ambient rather than hard boundaries of time and space. Memory and migration are bound together in such a way that the new place may offer the migrant a less intransigent dislocation, a reduced sense of alienation. A cosmopolitan approach to the transmission of refugee memory is one way to remember the past: by putting it in the service of a better future.